Taking rel-nofollow into account has been and is something to only start thinking about when you’ve done everything else right (title tags, keywords in module titles, external links etc.). Still, combined with the disappearance of the related lenses feature – I AM, on my low ranking lenses, getting rid of most keywords – precisely because of pagerank leak. I have no idea yet whether it will help, and even if they do suddenly start ranking, whether it’s because of this. Still, it’s something to think about, when you’ve tried everything else.

I’m sure you’re not saying that it’s a bad idea to make lensographies and promote them? After all – even leaving rel-nofollow aside – those are (if done right) topical links, whereas linking to a profile generally isn’t. Except of course for those who have a different profile for each niche.

Thanks. I just keep up with the SEO news – and this one’s big.

Something else I’ve been doing today: getting rid of the dandyID module on most of my lenses. I had it in my template, so it was on all my new lenses made in the past few months. It was also on most of my lensographies. Now, as far as I’m aware, it’s only still on my where I’m at online lens, where it fits the topic. Everywhere else it’s gone for being a lensrank evaporator.

Teddi
http://www.squidoo.com/teddi

Andrew: I don’t like it either – it’s not so much leeching as evaporating – simply disappearing. But google has the right to calculate lensrank any way they please. And this policy doesn’t just effect squidoo, it negatively effects wikipedia too, and I can’t say I’m sorry about that. SEO’s will have to rethink how to deal with this and in the meantime the advice is probably to either not link out at all, or to link out with followed links as much as possible. As I said – if it’s a choice between pagerank disappearing or it going into the community, going into the community is probably best for everyone.

But you’re right: everybody who favorites a lens ads a no-followed link to a lens. We’ll just have to live with it. Community features have their own advantages after all.

Ultimately they created the importance of links, and any thing they change in their policy about how to deal with them will effect web professionals. Because google is so powerful. But in this case the effect is mostly on those sites where rel nofollow is used – and those are the SEO’d sites google probably worries most about anyhow. After all – they want to reward quality, not marketing or technological know how.